It's 2024, we can do better than blurry horribly blown out pictures these days. Check for example https://mapper.acme.com/?ll=34.39719,113.94792&z=15&t=SL&mar... for cleaner shot of the site (zoom in few notches for extra details). Google Maps annoyingly cuts half-way through the factory site.
edit: that ACME mapper image looks to be from mid-2023, in more recent imagery the construction on the east side has been completed.
The thing about that image that amuses me the most is that there is a local grid pattern that isn't aligned north-south, and the factory goes "don't care" and instead smashes itself through everything on a straight cardinal direction alignment.
Though you can see the same alignment as the factory in town further to the west, with newer streets.
I guess it makes sense to align the factory to this grid, and not to the older grid that followed the fields.
The way Chinese towns are organized is incredible. I'm impressed by this map.
No freight train connection to the factory??
There is. In fact it's called a "land port" for a reason, the park has a huge freight yard connected to 2 rail lines it's just not shown in this picture because it's shared infrastructure of the industrial park.
I don't think there is any railway link to the site, at least in the short term. Both of the two rail lines nearby are passanger only high speed (250 km/h to 350 km/h) lines (references: https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E9%83%91%E9%98%9C%E9%AB%98%E... , https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E9%83%91%E6%B8%9D%E9%AB%98%E... ). The train yard ~5 km north of the factory is 郑州南动车所, also a high speed rail depot.
That area is called 郑州港区 (literal translation Zhengzhou "port area", full name: 郑州航空港经济综合实验区) is actually for it's closeness to the airport (ZHCC). English reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhengzhou_Airport_Economy_Zone .
Yeah I think so. Zhengzhou has perhaps the largest yard in China. The factory is there for a reason.
Toggle the layer to "Map" and you can find the railway lines easily, although train in the depot looks like a high speed train (huge, long windscreen).
All that track connected to the depot you are talking about is high speed passenger infrastructure. Just touching the south side of the factory is what looks like an old single track line if you follow it to the west there's a passing loop just the other side of the nearest village. If you switch to back and forth between map view and satellite view this eventually leads to a spur shown in map view that stops at a road. Not sure if the line is under construction or decommissioned or what.
I'm uncertain what to look for, since there's this "land port" which refers to high speed passenger and freight trains being brought together.
When you zoom out far enough in ACME mapper, the factory disappears. (I'm guessing that's an older image.)
Yep, pretty common for different zoom levels to be different time points. ACME is using plane photography for its high zoom images. You could try zoom.earth for hourly/12hourly satellite imagery.
Although it is generally true that aerial photography is used to supplant satellite imagery in these sorts of public map services, I'm pretty confident that the image of BYD factory here is actual satellite imagery.
Yeah, China tends to classify aerial survey photos as strategic intelligence assets.
Did a scientific project there. It was a whole thing. The local/city/regional CCP branch was not cooperative with even the most innocuous low altitude drone data gathering from foreigners for ecology studies, despite sponsorship by local & national universities.
There is even a random-geometric-distortion obfuscation layer that you have to apply to maps you're allowed to serve up publicly while doing business in China, like one of those distorted mesh grid paintings. Takes in WGS84 and spits out a nonsense projection a hundred meters away.
Why did you expect local officials to stick their necks out for you?
They don’t make the relevant laws but can be punished by higher authorities for breaking them.
Unless it could be legally guranteed any potential punishment would be transferred to your team’s shoulders, it’s bizarre to expect someone else sitting in some municipal office to take the risk.
Why did you expect a foreigner who is not from China to realize that they'd be inhibited by the local authorities from doing work they were invited to do by those same local authorities? It's bizarre to think that it's bizarre that a foreigner might merely express some surprise by that.
Which would make sense if it was assumed there were only a few people in the entire bureaucracy… but doesn’t make sense when everyone involved knows, ahead of time, there are millions...
Probably thousands even in some random small city.
I’m guessing no one on the team had ever coordinated even a thousand people before on some complex legal issue. So it’s just bizarre to suddenly expect anyone capable of that would do so on their behalf and reach out with invitations…
Not all countries are like China.
Other places could have a helpful bureaucracy, or one that ignores the laws, or accepts bribes.
How does this matter when the country is known ahead of time, and the relevant laws, the details, etc., are all widely known to be nowhere near identical?
It’s not like someone could accidentally board a flight to China and clear immigration by happenstance, or without being informed that things may be very different from their home country.
They were probably optimistic, incorrectly. It's easy to think everything will work when you have a written guarantee from the government, and have never personally experienced a dysfunctional, authoritarian bureaucracy.
An invitation from a local official can not be a written guarantee of something beyond them?
It’s not even a guarantee of getting the relevant visa in time, that’s true for every big country I know of.